Getting WoW running was straightforward. I installed the Nvidia 3d drivers via the System/Administration/Additional Drivers menu, installed some build tools like this:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

I then downloaded the latest wine, compiled and installed it. I copied my .wine-wow directory from my old laptop and ran the launcher.

I went to a nice lunch with my wife for a couple of hours, and the whole of Turbine was still down when I came back. A couple of hours later, signs of life appeared. The maintenance page was up. One of the sites was throwing mysql errors. This was a data error, not a connect error at first. Later, the site threw connection errors, so I assume they brought down MySQL for repair.

At first, I thought this was a network outage. Maybe their ISP had an issue. Maybe their core router blew up. I’m actually leaning toward some sort of power failure because of the database issues I saw. Usually, a data center has redundant power, so failure would be remarkable.

All of this was very interesting to speculate on when I checked in on the sites, but I’m sure several poor operations guys were under a ton of stress on a Sunday… Probably their busiest day of the week… with the highest revenue…. mostly lost.

Why don’t I like hadoop? I state for the record that I only have a passing familiarity with hadoop from reviewing the docs and some modest amount of administration. My opinions are mostly uninformed.

Hadoop includes a distributed filesystem… written in java… This sends up a big red flag in my head. Filesystems are an OS level concern in my experience. Writing a distributed filesystem in java with no OS hooks seems on its face to start with an inefficient model. It’s also not a general purpose filesystem, so the usual unix (or windows) tools for dealing with filesystems can’t be used on HDFS. Many current super computers use the Lustre filesystem. Lustre has been around for more then a decade and is a very mature product. I’m not suggesting that Lustre is right for hadoop, but the list of claimed features for both is pretty similar. Since Lustre uses a POSIX filesystem interface, I can use all of my unix tools on it.

Job scheduling is another well traveled path that Hadoop developers decided to walk again. The hadoop developers have arguments against MPI and PVM schemes which are used in most Beowulf clusters. Maybe the arguments are valid, but I don’t see a reason why one couldn’t build on such a mature technology to produce an adequate scheduler. In fact people have built built such a scheduler.

On the other hand, HBase and the actual MapReduce components are novel. My main problem with hadoop is that they decided to build components which are readily available elsewhere, are probably more efficiently written, are certainly more mature, and integrate well into the OS. One of the advantages of open source projects is that one can borrow from other good projects. I think the interesting parts of hadoop would have advanced farther if they had used the well studied portions of beowulf clusters and other technologies as a base instead of building them.

• Wifi
• Suspend to memory
• Proprietary drivers for the Nvidia video card
• The media panel
• The nice volume control
• The CDRom/DVD. I assume the blueray portion doesn’t work.
• The USB, VGA, and HDMI ports.

Here are the problem areas that I’ve run into. I haven’t had time to sort them out. When I address the issues, I’ll probably write a new post.

• Sound works, but only from two of the five speakers.
• If you place two fingers on the track pad, the pointer flakes out.
• The wifi button is too close to the ctl key. I need to find a way to disable it.

There is plenty I haven’t tested too. Here are the unknown components:

• Finger print scanner. I’ve read that this won’t work with linux.
• Webcam. This is supposed to work fine.
• Firewire, eSATA, and “Display” ports. I’ve read that these work fine.
• SD card/Memory Stick slot.
• ExpressCard slot.

Overall, I am very pleased with this laptop. My wife did a great job picking it out and getting it for a good price (thank you honey). Since this was a fresh install, I decided to go for a new install of wine for all of those games that I like. Here is what I got running and what was required to get it running.

Wine 1.1.35 itself wouldn’t compile initially. This seems to be a known bug when compiling on 64 bit platforms. One solution is to remove the libmpg123 package. I preferred to keep the package, so I edited the file dlls/winemp3.acm/mpegl3.c. I changed line 642 from:

mpg123_feedseek(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

to:

mpg123_feedseek_64(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

Wine compiled fine after that.

Civilization required the installation of winetricks and the packages: msxml3 and d3dx9.

EVE just required adding allfonts with winetricks.

Runes of Magic runs without a hitch. Perfect World runs without a problem. Fallout 3 won’t even install. I will post when I figure out the problem there. I haven’t installed Oblivion, but I don’t expect any problems there.

Both of these little devices run linux. In the past I’ve used the compiler and perl, so I know they aren’t too dumbed down. They also can pass as small web servers. Wikipedia has a writeup on the zaurus in general. It also has links to various mostly out of date operating systems for it. Angstrom seems to be the most up to date distribution. The last package updates seem to be from late 2008. At the time of this writing, the angstrom link is broken, but it worked a couple of days ago. Hopefully, the outage is temporary.

I won’t go into a full review of the Zaurus. I can tell you why they are interesting for me. Here is the list.

• The zaurus has a functioning keyboard that even I can use with my huge gorilla hands.
• They have a CF slot, an SD slot, and the SL-C300 has a USB port for expansion. The CF slot can accommodate wifi and other peripheral cards.
• They run linux out of box, and there are several alternatives if you don’t like the built-in distribution.
• They are small and lightweight, even compared to my Sony Vaio UX280P.

I’m a little sad that Sharp has stopped making and supporting the Zaurus. If I had the time, I’d take on the project of updating one of the distributions. For now, I’ll just install something and see if I can find a good use for them. Here are some pictures.

This is the Zaurus SL-5500. The quarter next to it is for size reference. The bottom piece with the OK botton slides up to hide the keyboard.

The SL-C3000 is a “clam shell” style PDA. The one pictured has a compact flash Wifi card in the right side.

This is the SL-C3000 in “portrait mode. The Screen flips around and hides the keyboard.

What’s the moral of the story? Do the obvious thing first instead of last.

I use AWStats to give me statistics about what kind of readers I have. Amazingly, I do have readers and some of them are even regular readers. Here are some of the useless stats:

• The most alarming one is that readership has dropped off since I stopped writing about WoW.
• 59% of the readers use FireFox.
• 38% of you use Linux to browse this site, which explains a lot of the firefox usage.
• The most popular article is my pre-raid shaman gear guide, even though it’s probably a bit dated.
• The most popular EVE article is the one which describes installing EVE on Ubuntu. This article is 1/3rd as popular as the shaman gear guide.

My sister thinks I should write more often and include more images. I’ll attempt to keep up, and I’ll probably thumbnail some images if they add to the post. Since I don’t currently play WoW, I won’t be able to fix the content issue.

Recent and Future Changes:

I’ve done a small bit of optimization to the web server backend to this blog. Hopefully, the load times will decrease and my bandwidth usage will shrink.

I’m also considering moving to a summary of each post instead of the whole post on the front page. You would have to click through to the article if you are interested in its content. I may change the “skin” of the site. I want to keep it simple and fast to load, but I want to make it more visually appealing. I may ask my sister, “The Web Designer” for suggestions.

I’ve talked about adding advertisements before. I’ve been procrastinating because my perception is that there will be a lot of administrative overhead which I don’t have the time for. I’ll leave this as an open issue for now.